Diabolical Plots #107, January 2024

“A Descending Arctic Excavation of Us” by Sara S. Messenger

“They Are Dancing” by John Stadelman

Reviewed by David Wesley Hill

I pride myself on being a discerning reader, but I have to admit I couldn’t make heads nor tails of “A Descending Arctic Excavation of Us” by Sara S. Messenger in the January issue of Diabolical Plots. The tale follows the protagonist drilling into the arctic with an “auger bit modified using forbidden ancestral smithery.” Eventually, they reach a frozen human body—the body of the narrator—only to leave the corpsicle behind and return to the surface “soaked in bacterial musk.” Here, it seems, is the point of the story, that it’s best not to disturb the ice, else you risk releasing extinct pathogens into the world—“unearthing ancient horror to bring back to your masses”—but I could be wrong. It’s possible the story is a technical literary exploration of the pathetic fallacy, which is over-used throughout the piece to address a multitude of micro-organisms. Or it’s an examination of generational trauma—why else would the protagonist drug their grandparents and steal the coordinates to the buried body? I have no clue, none at all. Perhaps a more perceptive reader than this reviewer will succeed where I failed and decipher the story. Good luck.

I have never read Stephen King’s novella “The Langoliers,” but I did watch the TV mini-series. Briefly, a red-eye flight from Los Angeles passes through a rip in time into the past, which, being the past, is an insipid, lifeless place. King turns this premise into a horror tale, but “They Are Dancing” by John Stadelman, the second January offering of Diabolical Plots, uses a similar scenario as the basis for a story about the end of a romance. In the reality of Vicky and Nash, time progresses in waves, and the doomed couple have been left behind in an eddy of the past, “a relic world.” The future, however, continues to gain on them, no matter how they try to outrun it and “stay together, and in love.” That they will eventually run out of road is, of course, inevitable in this metaphorical reflection on the nature of intimacy… Not quite science fiction, not quite fantasy, “They Are Dancing” is an odd fable that didn’t really work for this reviewer but may appeal to readers who are less of a curmudgeon than I am. Maybe that’s you.